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When Hiss counterattacked with a libel suit, Chambers finally introduced the charge of espionage, and supported his case with the nearly forgotten documents that he retrieved from his wife's nephew, who had stored them inside an unused dumb-waiter shaft. But even then, Chambers did not produce the microfilm—later he explained that he was afraid it might contain material that would damage other people. With characteristic melodrama, Chambers hid the film roll in a hollowed-out pumpkin in a field on his Maryland farm, surrendered it only when he became convinced that a committee counsel suspected him of withholding evidence. Discouraged by the "indifference" of the world, Chambers later said he had tried to kill himself during the trials. But even his suicide attempt was bizarre: he sniffed the fumes of a cyanide compound and ended up with only a throbbing headache.
Last Judgments. The first Hiss trial ended in a hung jury. On Jan. 25, 1951, the second trial sentenced Hiss to jail for five years for committing perjury when he denied passing documents to Chambers. Still protesting his innocence, Hiss was freed in November 1954, landed a job at $100 a week with a Manhattan manufacturer of women's combs, and worked his way up to a salary of $20,000 a year. Last year he took a new job as a salesman for stationery and printing firms.
After the trials, Chambers retired to his farm in Maryland and began work on Witness, a book in the classic confessional mold, its fire somewhat dampened by its self-pity—a book that has curiously passed out of conversation. In 1959 Chambers went back to school at Western Maryland College, majored in French, and earned warm praise from the department head: "He was a man capable of real contributions to scholarship."
Whittaker Chambers' last word on the Hiss case was printed in 1959 by the right-wing National Review, for which he worked briefly as an editor. Alger Hiss, declared Chambers, had not paid his penalty "except in the shallowest legalistic sense. There is only one possible payment, as I see it, in his case. It is to speak the truth. Hiss's defiance perpetuates and keeps a fracture in the community as a whole."